Don’t start from scratch

We all want to leverage our time and effort. That’s why ideas like the 80/20 rule are so popular. Work on something until it’s good enough, then move on. But what if you want to go beyond 80%?

A couple weeks ago I was up in the mountains of North Carolina for a mastermind retreat. During one of our feedback sessions, James Clear asked for feedback on his wildly popular blog. That gave me a chance to mention something that I’d been thinking about for a while: though I liked his blog’s minimal style, I felt the design didn’t live up to the quality of his content.

James thought for a second and said, “I guess I could get it redesigned.”

James didn’t need a site redesign. He just needed to add the final level of polish to make his design truly stellar.

So that’s what we did. After dinner that night, James started making changes. I’d point out little things like: “Let’s find a new font for that title,” or “Let’s change the navigation color.” But for the most part, James spent the next 2 hours making small tweaks and asking the group, “What do you think?”

Instead of starting from scratch and having to spend days designing and building a new design, James took his site design from good enough to great! in mere hours.

Had he hired a designer or created an entirely new design, it probably would have only reached 80% before it was declared good enough and everyone moved on to the other aspects of running a popular blog.

Fix the little things

At ConvertKit, an email platform for pro bloggers, I’ve prioritized growing the business and designing a solid user experience over adding little bits of polish to the interface. That means ConvertKit is powerful, easy to use software, but it lacks the nice icons, illustrations, and animations that really complete the experience.

There were a handful of little quirks that really bothered me, so the other day I opened up my code editor and started fixing them.

I changed the hover state on a button, organized form fields on a page, made it so you could link to a specific tab on the settings page, and reworked the success and error messages.

What surprised me is just how little time these things took to fix. Some of these issues had bugged me for months, but I’d never had time to take care of them. But when I just set aside an hour and fixed the little things, it was amazing how quickly everything came together.

James noticed the same thing. His site didn’t take weeks to redesign. Instead the process took 2-3 hours.